The Women's Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the written word's power to incite social change. In this new collection, Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr curate essays that reveal how second-wave feminists embraced this potential with a vengeance. The authors in This Book Is an Action investigate the dynamic print culture that emerged as the feminist movement reawakened in the late 1960s. The works created by women shined a light on taboo topics and offered inspiring accounts of personal transformation. Yet, as the essayists reveal, the texts represented something far greater: a distinct and influential American literary renaissance. On the one hand, feminists took control of the process by building a network of publishers and distributors owned and operated by women. On the other, women writers threw off convention to venture into radical and experimental forms, poetry, and genre storytelling, and in so doing created works that raised the consciousness of a generation. Examining feminist print culture from its structures and systems to defining texts by Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker, This Book Is an Action suggests untapped possibilities for the critical and aesthetic analysis of the diverse range of literary production during feminism's second wave.| Cover Title Contents Introduction Part I 1. Feminist Publishing/Publishing Feminism: Experimentation in Second-Wave Book Publishing 2. A Revolution in Ephemera: Feminist Newsletters and Newspapers of the 1970s 3. "What Made Us Think They'd Pay Us for Making a Revolution?" Women in Distribution (WinD), 1974–19 4. Closely, Consciously Reading Feminism Part II 5. "The Element That Shaped Me, That I Shape by Being in": Alternative Natures in Margaret Atwood's 6. The Second-Wave Sandbox: Anne Roiphe's Monstrous Motherhood 7. Desire and Fantasy in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying 8. Coming Out and Tutor-Text Performance in Jane Chambers's Lesbi-dramas 9. Creating a Nonpatriarchal Lineage in Bertha Harris's Lover 10. The Color Purple and the Wine-Dark Kiss of Death: How a Second-Wave Feminist Wrote the First A 11. "This Really Isn't a Job for a Girl To Take on Alone": Reappraising Feminism and Genre Fiction Contributors Index | A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016
|Jaime Harker is an associate professor of English at The University of Mississippi. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America. Cecilia Konchar Farr is a professor of English and women's studies at St. Catherine University. She is the author of Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads.